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All-Star Lineup of TV Walk-Ons

Ken Griffey Jr., right, appeared in a 1994 episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" with Alfonso Ribeiro, left, and Will Smith.Credit
Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank

It’s been a spunky year for cameos and guest spots on television series. “The Office” had Jim Carrey. “NCIS” had Bob Newhart. “Glee” had Chewbacca.

But because I’m a baseball fan, my favorite moment came last month when Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame third baseman, turned up on one of television’s most underrated series, “Psych.” The episode, “Dead Man’s Curveball,” involved deaths at a minor-league ballpark, and it suggested a hot-stove exercise in frivolousness: a search for the All-Cameo Team.

Baseball fans, who seem to have more time to waste than normal people, love to compile All-This or All-That teams: lineups made of real players who meet some criterion. The All-Steroids Team. The All-Mustache Team. The idea is to find one player for each position who fits the category.

This may not be the first such list — it’s actually not uncommon for ballplayers to log some air time, especially in recent years — but I made up some rules to make the challenge harder:

¶The player can be playing himself, but the appearance has to have been in a scripted series. A few minutes in Jay Leno’s guest seat doesn’t qualify. Neither does reading David Letterman’s Top 10 list. That, alas, rules out one of the greatest moments in television history for baseball fans: Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Bill Skowron singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1958.

¶No more than three cameos from any one decade. Otherwise the list might be too current; the fun is in finding the oldies.

So with those caveats, here’s my All-Cameo Team, National League-style: no designated hitter. Because what’s more amusing than watching a pitcher bat?

LEADING OFF AND PLAYING FIRST BASE Rod Carew, chosen for his hilarious appearance as a bobble-head doll on an episode of “George Lopez” from 2002 called “The Unnatural.” The episode focuses on the title character’s son, who is such a bad Little League player that his coach asks that he call in sick for a big game. The writers follow the classic rule of drama laid out by Chekhov, or someone: If a signed baseball, Dad’s prize possession, appears early in the show, by the end an offspring has to accidentally destroy it, generally by having it chewed up by a dog. Also bobble-heading through the episode: Steve Garvey, Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan. Incidentally, Carew is often thought of as a second baseman, but he actually played more games at first. Also, in the show, his bobble-head is wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform, so he doesn’t count against the California rule despite his later days as an Angel.

BATTING SECOND, THIRD BASE Boggs, who is tangentially involved in helping the “Psych” boys figure out why a coach with the minor-league Seabirds died and who murdered the team’s star player. Boggs, who played 11 years for the Boston Red Sox before moving to the Yankees and then the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (before they dropped the “Devil”), could also be on this list for his 1988 appearance on a “Cheers” episode called “Bar Wars.” He’s actually quite natural on camera, unlike a lot of the players on this list. He also played a deputy sheriff this year in a Syfy movie called “Swamp Shark.”

BATTING THIRD, LEFT FIELD Stan Musial, the St. Louis Cardinals great, honored here for his 1970 appearance on the Marlo Thomas sitcom “That Girl,” which the Shout Factory put out a few years ago. It’s a two-parter called “There Sure Are a Bunch of Cards in St. Louis.” Ms. Thomas’s character travels to St. Louis, hometown of her fiancé, Donald. By happenstance, they meet Musial in a bar. “The Cards!” the fiancé prompts when she doesn’t recognize the name. And she replies, “Oh, you’re one of Donald’s poker-playing buddies.”

BATTING CLEANUP, RIGHT FIELD Hank Aaron, who played for Milwaukee and Atlanta, has other television credits, but he’s on this list for an episode of “MacGyver” from 1987. The home-run king at the time, he appears as himself, giving pointers to a minor-league team run by a former hit man — the mob-related kind of hits — who is in the witness protection program but has stupidly allowed his picture to be published in a newspaper. If you have hopes that Aaron, who appears early, will return to play some heroic part in the climactic scene — bringing down a fleeing bad guy by lining a baseball off his head, for instance — alas, his only purpose is to be struck out by a young pitcher who needs a confidence boost. Aaron at this point was in his 50s, by the way.

BATTING FIFTH, CENTER FIELDKen Griffey Jr., who strolled through “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” in 1994, when he was just coming into his prime with the Seattle Mariners. He turns up at a carnival long enough to throw a few balls half-heartedly at a stack of bottles and aim a put-down line at Will Smith’s character. The balls miss, but the put-down scores a direct hit.

BATTING SIXTH, SECOND BASE Chase Utley, the Philadelphia Phillies star, who along with his teammate Ryan Howard helps make a hilarious episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” last year even more hilarious. It is called “The Gang Gets Stranded in the Woods” and involves a trip to New Jersey, a charity event, a rabbit and a trucker with an appetite for male prostitutes.

BATTING SEVENTH, SHORTSTOP Alan Trammell, who gives Tom Selleck tickets to a ballgame in an episode of “Magnum, P.I.” in 1983 (when Trammell hit .319 and stole a career-high 30 bases for the Detroit Tigers). Magnum has gone to Detroit to hunt down some guy and is at a bar lamenting to no one in particular that looking for the fellow has taken up so much time that he hasn’t made it out to the stadium to see his beloved Tigers. Trammell is at the same bar with his double-play partner, Lou Whitaker. “Here’s our business cards,” he says, tossing Magnum tickets to the next game. Whitaker adds: “You’re sitting between home and first. We’ll be between first and third.” Magnum, who doesn’t recognize them — what kind of Tigers fan is he? — is baffled. “Wait a minute,” he says as the two players walk out, “there are no seats between first and third.”

BATTING EIGHTH, CATCHING Johnny Bench, of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, was only one of many ridiculous features in a preposterous episode of “Mission: Impossible” from 1970. Bench turns up briefly playing a captain of the guard, marching an honor guard into and out of a hall where the preserved body of an important figure in a Cuba-like country is on display in a glass coffin. These may have been the worst guards in history: while four of them are standing at attention, backs to the coffin, members of the “M.I.” team snatch it, body and all, by lowering hooks and hauling it up to the rafters without being noticed.

BATTING NINTH AND PITCHING Because I can, I’ve selected both a left-handed and a right-handed starter. Each makes this list because of injury, sort of.

The leftie is Randy Johnson, who appeared in an episode of the Disney series “The Jersey” in 2002, when he was part of a formidable one-two punch with Curt Schilling in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ rotation. The show is about a magical sports jersey, which in this episode gives a young character named Morgan a glimpse of the future, allowing her to say the improbable line, “We can’t let Aunt Kate break Randy Johnson’s hand.”

The right-hander is Nolan Ryan, looking impossibly young in a 1975 appearance on the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” Ryan had by this time been traded away by the Mets in an infamous deal, but the episode finds him back in New York wearing an Angels jacket. He walks into Ryan’s pub, the show’s home base, to say thanks because members of the clan had helped him at the nearby hospital when he injured his knee playing basketball. The bar-owning Ryans make much of the fact that the ballplayer shares their name, though they are unrelated. None of them seem to notice that he’s a terrible actor.

So there’s the starting 10 of the All-Cameo Team. Someone else can fill in the bench players and relief pitchers, though with six Hall of Famers, they’re hardly needed. The pitching staff (with just two guys!) has nine no-hitters, one perfect game and 10,589 strikeouts. The offense has four members of the 3,000-hit club. Its table-setters have 12 batting titles between them, and the three hitters in the heart of the order have 1,860 home runs. If the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has a softball league, I like my chances.

A version of this article appears in print on December 24, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: All-Star Lineup Of TV Walk-Ons. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe